Congregations Sing Better with Familiar Hymns

Since the Anglican choral revival of the 19th century, music has been a central part of the Anglican identity — second only to the prayer book. At best, parishes that neglect their music are offering an incomplete version of Anglican worship, which both disappoints though who know better, and lowers the expectations (and musical understanding) of those who’ve only experienced second best.

In visiting various traditional (hymnal-based, mostly Rite I) parishes over the past 20 years, I’ve always tried to get ideas about how improve the music in the church. Still, there is a wide range of variation across local parishes.

Some differences are pretty obvious when you walk in. St. Martin’s in Houston — the largest Episcopal Church in the country — has a well-trained and screened 32-voice choir, suitable for a presidential funeral. Other U.S. parishes have impressive soloists, fancy organist, or the most demanding repertoire of the great English cathedrals or collegiate chapels.

At the other extreme, many small churches have a piano or no accompaniment at all. Worse yet, some give up entirely and only offer a said service, every service of every week of the year.

But if you pay attention, you will also notice a difference in congregational singing. Two churches 10 miles apart may differ dramatically in singing from the pews, particularly if one has made a conscious effort to improve congregational participation and skill.

Webinar: “Music in a Small Church”

I’ve just posted the video (on YouTube) and a story (on the Continuing Forward website) from a panel discussion that I recently led with two parish priests and a music director on how to improve the music in a small Anglican church. Our focus was on Continuing Anglican parishes, which worship from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer and (most often) from Hymnal 1940. (Some parishes have adopted the Book of Common Praise 2017).

Some of the advice is not surprising, as when one said “any music is better than no music.” I certainly have lived out this maxim over the last decade when organizing a capella singing at diocesan and national retreats (including at our 2022 and 2024 national mission retreats). The singing has been quite effective when there is a core group familiar with the sung liturgy (both chant and hymns) and willing to sing out.

The panelists minced no words about the importance of the priest leading the congregation’s singing by example. They also encouraged expanding the congregation’s repertoire through regular use of a hymn sing (congregational singing practice) held midweek.

A Standard Canon of Anglican Music

However, one topic that did not (directly) come up was the importance of leveraging and reinforcing a recognizably standard repertoire of hymns. I can’t tell you how often people have left a service with comments “Did you know that hymn?” and “No, did you?” — sure signs that the musical choices have created confusion.

There are really three issues here:

1. Each parish will have a list of hymns they know. When we joined a (recently formed) ACNA church in 2009, the rector shared with me a list of 90 “Hymn Favs.” Given a chance, I might have “accidentally” dropped a dozen and would not have cared either way about another 10 or 20, but certainly 50 or 60 are ones that would be recognized at any US Anglican church.†
2. A musically savvy Anglican visitor or new member walking into a parish will rightfully expect certain hymns to be sung on certain days of the liturgical year, choices that have remained steady across a range of hymnals in the last 90 years.
3. Conversely, a parish should be teaching the standard canon of Anglican hymnody as part of their annual repertoire. If every parish has its own idiosyncratic hymns or mass settings, then we’re failing to provide the common worship sought by Cranmer — just as much if every parish had its own prayer book.

Together, these point to the importance of teaching and reinforcing a standard list of pieces that is shared by hundreds of other churches around the country. This usually requires selecting a recognized hymnal, and being judicious in what is (and is not) selected from such hymnal.

For the ordinary of the Mass, the choices are more bounded. Traditional language U.S. parishes have standardized on three settings: the medieval (Douglas’ Missa Marialis), Reformation (Merbecke’s Booke of Common Praier Noted) and early 20th century (Willan’s Sancta Maria Magdelena). If you walk into a parish on any given Sunday, if the congregation is singing the ordinary (rather than listening to the choir), it will normally be one of these three.

For Rite II or (2019) liturgy, there is less standardization. My favorite to sing (as someone who tries to avoid Rite II or Hymnal 1982 wherever possible) is Proulx’s adaptation of Schubert’s Deutsche Messe. However, the most reverent is Hurd’s New Plainsong, while it seems difficult to avoid the Powell mass setting among those who use H82. (The latest ACNA hymnal introduces five new modern language mass settings, and it’s unclear which if any will become widely used).

† For various reasons beyond the scope of today’s post, there are key differences between the US and English canon of Anglican hymnody.

The Canon of Anglican Hymnody

Picking common hymns is a numerically more challenging exercise. Across the four most recent U.S. Anglican (including Episcopal) hymnals — H40, H82, MTL and SuTL — I identified 1225 distinct hymn texts and 1650 text-tune pairings. Using the latter definition, the four hymnals have 639 to 751 “hymns”, and thus none has even half of the available list of hymns.

Still, at certain times of year, some choices are obvious:

• Advent: “Come Thou Long Expected Jesus,” “Lo! He Comes with Clouds Descending,” “On Jordan’s Bank,” and “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” 
• Epiphany: “What Star is This, with Beams so Bright” and “Earth Has Many a Noble City” 
• Lent: “Forty Days and Forty Nights“
• Palm Sunday: All Glory Laud and Honor”
• Holy Week:  “O Sacred Head Sore Wounded”

and of course Vaughan Williams’ “Hail Thee Festival Day” once (or all three times) at the high feasts of the spring. Yes, on Christmas and Easter there are so many great hymns to choose from, but if you don’t sing “Holy, Holy, Holy” and “I Bind Unto Myself Today” on Trinity Sunday, you need a new music scheduler. Certainly, those hymns that are found across all four hymnals are those who have stood the test of time.

I will concede that there are two problematic areas:

• Choice of Tunes. Hymnals include multiple tunes, and different parishes will have different habits. As a choirboy, we always sang “Ride On, Ride On in Majesty” to King’s Majesty, composed for this purpose for The Hymnal (1940). I was shocked when I joined a parish 400 miles away that had never heard of this tune, and instead preferred Winchester New, the tune best known for “On Jordan’s Bank”; however, my preferred tune proved very difficult to sing in tempo and in tune without accompaniment.
• Ecumenical Considerations. In many congregations, the majority of the members come from a different Christian denomination, and want to import their own hymns into the parish. Recent hymnals include more borrowed hymns — particularly hymns well known across many traditions — as a way to address this concern within reason.

Conclusion

None of this should suggest that parishes won’t have their own local preferences. But if the majority (or even a large plurality) of hymns are not familiar to other Anglican parishes, I would submit that the worship isn’t very Anglican.

The clergy or musical staff will certainly want to widen the parish’s comfort zone by adding important hymns that may be unfamiliar. But — and I know some will disagree with me here — it should not come at the cost of ruining the worship experience of those who come to church to sing, and are among the vast majority of Americans who cannot sightread an unfamiliar melody or rhythm. If a majority of the day’s hymns are unfamiliar, it will be no surprise if the congregation responds accordingly.

I believe the best test of congregational singing is how well people sing when there’s no choir or organ to carry them. At our 2024 retreat, we had wonderful singing by 30 people in the small chapel — not because of a large number of top singers, but it was because we chose familiar hymns. For the two masses we sang

• Tuesday: “Glorious things of thee are spoken,” “Lo, he comes with clouds descending,” “Humbly I adore thee,” and “Jerusalem, my happy home” 
• Wednesday: “I bind unto myself,”  “O spirit of the living God,”  “Come with us, O blessed Jesus,” and “Christ for the world we sing”
  

Yes, it’s a challenge to maintain pitch and tempo when singing all seven verses of St. Patrick’s Breastplate a capella. But on the other hand, the hymns were all well known to those assembled from across the country. Also, consistent with longstanding best practice,  the closing hymns were familiar, upbeat melodies with a message aligned to the theme of the respective masses.

As Anglicans, we have a proud heritage of creating and sharing distinct hymns. We also borrow specific hymns by authors and composers from other traditions, such as “A Mighty Fortress” (Luther), “O God Our Help in Ages Past” (Watts) or “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling” (Wesley). But together, these form a standard corpus of Anglican hymnody, one we should proud to celebrate every Sunday morning.

Lessons learned from studying four U.S. hymnals

In the first decade of this blog, one of my ongoing preoccupations (and occasional blog subject) was speculating about someday having a new Anglican hymnal. Now we have two: the 2017 Magnify the Lord (aka Book of Common Praise 2017) and the 2023 Sing Unto the Lord.

The way it played out is different that what I expected back 15 or 20 years ago. While the ACNA was officially not founded until 2009, here in San Diego individual parishes started leaving TEC in December 2005.

Beyond differences in what hymnals were produced, the elephant in the room is the decline in the importance of hymnals over the past 30 or 40 years ago. In this century, a large number of ACNA parishes have decided they don’t want or need hymnals due to their culture and worship practices. Many put everything on a screen, and a few put everything in a booklet. Of the former, some are constantly chasing the newest music — which is fundamentally incompatible with a fixed, agreed-upon corpus of music shared between churches and over multiple decades.

Hymnal Fragmentation

Compared to what I expected in 2005 or 2010, the most obvious difference is that there are now 4 hymnals used by non-TEC Anglicans, instead of one or maybe two. But after working to become a hymn scholar over these past years, I now know that that frequently a denomination or publisher will be disappointed when it tries to replace an old hymnal with a new one, either for something “new” or to make more money selling the “upgrade.”

An iconic example was the failed attempt by the LCMS (or more accurately, its money-making CPH publishing arm) to sell users of The Lutheran Hymnal (1941) on “upgrading” to Lutheran Worship (1982). Of course, TLH was arguably the best and most influential U.S. Lutheran hymnal of the 20th century, while LW was (at best) a so-so compromise from a failed effort to produce a joint hymnal (the 1978 Lutheran Book of Worship) with its much more liberal LCMS brethren. CPH was more successful in wiping out TLH with its 2006 update (Lutheran Service Book), which is a decent hymnal but — more importantly — was backed both by a full CPH marketing push and a concerted denominational effort to eliminate older hymnals and unify under the new hymnal.*

The latter success cannot be a model for today’s ACNA hymnals. While The Hymnal (1940) and Hymnal 1982 were produced by official ECUSA committees (before “TEC” became the common acronym), MTL and SUL are hymnals for the ACNA but not by ecclesially-sponsored ACNA authorities. (MTL is an officially produced hymnal for the REC and its four US dioceses, but not mandated even for them). So in the next decade, there will be no stone tablets from Mt. Sinai (or Pittsburgh, Atlanta or Raleigh) saying “thou shalt buy this hymnal.”

(* Note: For Lutherans and Methodists among others, a “hymnal” includes both the music of an Anglican hymnal and all the liturgical elements that for Anglicans are found in a prayer book.)

Difficulty Evaluating Hymnals

I’ve spent more than six months examining the 800+ musical pieces in SUL, which required building databases that allow me to compare the two 21st century ACNA hymnals (SUL, MTL) with the two latest 20th century ECUSA ones (H82,H40) — ignoring The Hymnal (1916).

For the January 29 article on service music of SUL, I identified and cross-referenced 16 complete mass settings (nine traditional language, seven contemporary language) across these four hymnals; some of these are also found elsewhere. I also cataloged more than 200 specific pieces of communion music from full or partial mass settings (e.g., my favorite “Scottish” Gloria) found in at least one of these hymnals. I also cross-referenced nearly 400 pieces of Daily Office service music found in one or more hymnals.

Similar, for today’s (Aug 28) article on the SUL hymns, I made a database of 1216 unique hymn texts and 1630 hymn-text pairings found in one or more of these hymnals. While texts are standardized for service music (at least until recent divergence of contemporary translations), incrementally modified hymn texts made it more difficult (or even subjective) to decide if two hymns were the same text. Less obviously, some tunes have multiple names which makes it a challenge to match them unless you do so one hymn at a time.

Difficult Committee Decisions

I’ve never been on a hymnal committee (nor have I shipped a new jet engine, fighter plane or computer operating system). In earlier jobs, I did develop and maintain various forms of complex system software.

From studying these hymnals and talking to the two most recent editors (Chris Hoyt and Mark K. Williams), there are a lot of details to be tracked — of what you’re starting from, what you’d like to do, and what you end up adding, changing or deleting. Obviously it would help to have someone with OCB attached to the hymnal committee, as well as good tracking tools.

Unless you have a photographic memory, it’s nearly an impossible task, even with good tools. Talking to the editors 2,3,4 years after they made a decision, after spending a weekend on one small part of the hymnal (e.g. the change in Christmas hymns over a previous hymnal) I was probably that week more knowledgeable what the hymnal is (as opposed to why) than the person(s) who made it.

That doesn’t even get to the question of what decisions you want to make, and how you end up making them. It’s clear that the H40 and especially H82 decision making had both formalized processes and the logical consequence of such processes: bureaucracy and politics. I have not yet seen the H40 working papers, but it seems that the H82 process was the more political of the two— the hymnal feels like the result of conflicting visions rather than the relatively unified vision of H40 (or the stronger moral and technical authority of C.W. Douglas, who had no equal in the H82 process).

MTL had 1½ leaders — an editor (Hoyt) and a clear second-in-command, Andrew Dittman. Knowing the two, while they both have strong opinions and thus must have had conflicts, both have been friends and worked alongside each other for a long time. I thus see evidence of a blended effort to create a vision and implement that vision for the new hymnal.

From reading, emails and calls regarding SUL, its process was even more streamlined: Williams is the editor, and everyone else listed played an advisory role. Even more so than with the Douglas H40, SUL is the result of a unitary vision.

Inevitable Tradeoffs

What is in each hymnal? Below is a summary I published with my Part 1 review, including not just H40 but its two later updated editions (of which 1981 is now what’s found in most churches).

Table 1: Hymns and Service Music in U.S. Anglican hymnals, 1940-2023

	Hymnal 1940	Hymnal 1940 (1961)	Hymnal 1940 (1981)	Hymnal 1982	Book of Common Praise 2017	Sing Unto the Lord
Hymns[7]	725	725	751	720	639	741
Service music	141	160	175	288[8]	161	140
Total musical pieces	866	885	926	1008	800	881
Complete Mass settings	4	8	8	5	5	10

From this, there is roughly a “normal” size for the hymnal, the number of hymns, room for service music etc. So at a first order of approximation, if you want to add 200 hymns you have to drop 200 hymns. My guess is that for each hymnal, perhaps 10% of the hymns are clear losers — either from before when it went to print, or realized soon thereafter. But if dropping 200 hymns is 25% of the preceding hymnal, even if finding that next 10-15% to eliminate avoids hymns that are widely used, it still will end up dropping hymns that are important to someone.

Conclusion: No One Answer for Everyone

Looking back to 15 years ago, my biggest surprise is that there is still no “ACNA” hymnal for the entire province, let alone all US Anglicans. No one hymnal is suitable for all parishes across all dioceses of the ACNA, let alone Continuing churches. (The decision for Continuing Anglicans is much simpler, but there is still the choice of 1940 vs. 2017).

The flip side of this is that each of the 21st century hymnals is less of a compromise than H82, and thus a better fit to a specific subset of US Anglicans. So what would I recommend?

First, for existing users of H40 or H82, there’s no requirement to change. In many aspects of life newer is not better, let alone an “upgrade”. People meet in 100 year old buildings and some drive 30 year old cars or stay married for 60 years. Change is not, by its nature, inherently good. 

Over my many parish visits and conversations, my sense is that either there’s a groundswell of interest in replacing the old hymnal or there isn’t. Clearly, having a new rector or music director throw out the old hymnals because he can is not a sufficient reason to do so — any more than firing the assistant rector or getting rid of the organ is. In extreme cases, this can prove a career-limiting move.

However, some parishes have already decided to look for a new hymnal — or some new or newish parishes may not have a hymnal and thus can make the decision from scratch. Which hymnal should they choose?

1. The short answer: compare MTL and SUL to each other — and if you have a hymnal, to the one you have.
2. The next longest answer: MTL is the successor to H40 and SUL to H82, so unless your parish character has changed, the starting assumption is that the average parish will be more happy to “upgrade” within its lane.

But beyond these simple rules, there are further considerations:

• MTL is a less extensive revision and SUL a more extensive one (higher proportion of new material).
• MTL consciously valued saving material from H40 and rarely borrowed from H82 (the Hurd mass setting being the major exception). SUL has no particular loyalty to any previous hymnal, so there is no guarantee that your favorite hymn or setting from any of the previous hymnals will be kept. (Put another way, the editor chose what he thought best from MTL, H82 and H40, while recovering a few even older hymns).
• The ethos of MTL for things like inclusive language follows H40, i.e. almost none. SUL is certainly more aggressively updated than MTL and less updated than any 21st century TEC hymnal would be; on average, I'd say it’s between H82 and MTL: “Good Christian men” become “Good Christian friends” but with Chesterton we still sing "All Thy saints in warfare".

Finally, H82 came at a time when the 400 year old liturgy became Rite I and the prayer book was split into Rite I vs. Rite II. Thus, in the 1980s, both the prayer book and hymnal allowed for both, and together they were frequently used by parishes that had one service of each. Four decades later, the ACNA liturgy commission decided that contemporary language is the norm, that traditional language could be tolerated for a few cranky parishes, but that no prayer book would support both.

Each of the new hymnal mainly supports the 2019 or 2022 (“TLE”) ACNA liturgies. MTL is a Rite I (or TLE or 1928) hymnal with four traditional mass settings and (IMHO) the best of the H82 contemporary settings — David Hurd’s “New Plainsong.” If you’re an H82 parish and Hurd is not your preferred setting, you’ll be disappointed — as will those parishes that rotate between 2 or 3 settings across the liturgical year.

Instead of 4 vs. 1, SUL is slightly more balanced with 2 (TLE) settings vs. 6 for the modern (2019) texts. However, SUL omits one of the three core traditional settings. Perhaps it’s not one used in S.C., but (in my biased opinion) it’s the most musically important of the three, the Douglas “Missa Marialis” adapted from authentic medieval chants. (Of course, if all your mass settings are in the service booklet, you can ignore these two paragraphs).

But if you’re not a blended parish, nine times out of ten the default choice is the best choice. Going beyond that default choice would likely require understanding in more detail the differences in the core portfolios of 600-700 hymns that account for most of the pages of each book.

Below is what I’ve written on the subject of 21st century US Anglican hymnals; not a lot of other people are doing so. Beyond these articles, I am glad to provide resources (e.g. a database) to readers if someone is interested in more specifics on what’s different.

References

• West, Joel W. “Magnify the Lord,” book review, The Hymn, 71, 1 (Winter 2020): 41.
• West, Joel W. “Hymnal Choices for North American Anglicans,” North American Anglican, June 15, 2020.
• West, Joel W. “Anglican Hymnals in the 21st Century,” North American Anglican, July 19, 2024.
• West, Joel W. “Book Review: Sing Unto the Lord (Part 1) ,” North American Anglican, January 29, 2025.
• West, Joel W. “Book Review: Sing Unto the Lord (Part 2),” North American Anglican, August 28, 2025.

Hymnody Ascendant

Today was a rare midweek feast day for me: two sung Eucharist services, plus an evensong in one day. But the reason I'm blogging is that three hymns overlapped on the two Ascension masses.

Overlapping Editor Choices

The morning HC and evensong were part of the REC’s Anglican Way Institute annual conference, hosted by Holy Communion, the REC’s Dallas cathedral. The evening HC was at Chapel of the Cross, a sister REC parish a half hour away.

The former uses Magnify the Lord (Book of Common Praise 2017) as the former home parish of the MTL editor, while the latter since uses The Hymnal (1940). I sang in the (ad hoc) AWI choir at the former and in the pews at the latter, but essentially three hymns were the same with the same words and harmony.

I’ve also just finished by master database of 1600+ hymns in MTL, H40, H82 and the new Sing Unto the Lord (as part of finishing part 2 of my SUL hymnal review), so I was able to cross-references these hymns into H82 and SUL.

Here are the three hymns I sang twice, all with four part harmony:

1. All Hail the Pow’r of Jesus’ Name (Coronation in F): 6 verses (H40: 355 1st, H82: 450, MTL: 156, SUL: 175). Hymnary.org list 3,501 hymnals.
2. Hail the Day that Sees Him Rise (Llanfair in F): 4 verses (H40: 104 1st, H82: 214, MTL: 160, SUL: 181). Text by Charles Wesley in 553 hymnals
3. Crown Him With Many Crowns (Diademata in G): 5 verses (H40: 352, H82: 494, MTL: 149, SUL: 186).  807 hymnals

I don’t have a copy of H82 handy, but the H40 and MTL melody and bass part sung the same, and the SUL mens’ parts eyeball the same.

SUL has a descant by Richard Proulx, which (according to the Hymnal 1982 Companion) was previously found in H82. Neither H40 or MTL have any descants for any hymns.

Overlapping Musician Choices

Both services opened and ended with a crowd pleaser, but the AM had #1 for entrance, #2 for gradual and #3 for exit, while PM had #3 for entrance, #2 for sermon and #1 for entrance. Interestingly, MTL and SUL treated all three as Ascension hymns, while H40 and H82 only treated #2 as such.

The two hymnals I sang from have different hymn selection guides. I asked the PM music director about the overlap, and all he could offer is “great minds think alike.”

Both also used the Willan mass setting, but that is not surprising then since the 1940s that has been the standard “high” (or “ordinary”) season mass setting for US ECUSA (and later Anglican) parishes — at least until Rite II came along, when that role was taken by the Hurd or Powell setting. (Hurd seems normal to me but probably others would see it as serious and thus penitential rather than festive).

No doubt: Everyone's favorite St. Thomas hymn

The first Sunday after Easter is often called “low Sunday,” or sometimes as “Doubting Thomas Sunday.” Since the first English prayer book in 1549, the gospel reading has been from John 20:19-23, where Jesus greets the 11 and establishes auricular confession. More recently, that’s been extended toby adding verses 24-31, with the entire story of “Doubting” Thomas, appointed for all three years of the RCL and ACNA lectionaries. That was what we heard this morning at our 1928 BCP parish.

As I wrote in 2012, there is one hymn suitable for this date: “O sons and daughters let us sing!” set to the tune O Filii et Filiae. Here are excerpts from the Hymnal 1940 Companion (p. 73-74):

[The Latin original] was written by Jean Tisserand, a Franciscan monk, who died at Paris in 1949. It is first found in a small booklet without title printed between 1518 and 1536, probably at Paris.…The translation by John Mason Neale has been frequently altered since it was first published in his Mediævel Hymns and Sequences, 1851. 

The tune, O filli et filiae, is probably the original contemporary melody since none other has been used with the text. The earliest known form is a four-part setting … [from] 1623.

This hymn is #99 in my favorite hymnal (H40), with nine verses. The author notes that H40 drops three of the verses from Neale’s original, but it appears that the 1986 New English Hymnal adds a 10th verse after a very different adaptation of the same nine Neale verses.

All verses can be sung on Easter, but verses 1,5,6,7,8 are normally sung on low Sunday. The same hymn is #142 in Book of Common Praise 2017 (aka Magnify the Lord), the first hymnal published for ACNA usage, mainly as an update for H40 for traditional-language parishes.

As I noted earlier, Hymnal 1982 split this hymn into two separate hymns with the same tune: #203 with five Easter verses and #206 with six Doubting Thomas verses.

This month, I have been researching the second of my two-part review of Sing Unto the Lord, a 2023 hymnal published as a replacement for H82 for more contemporary language ACNA parishes. SUL replicates the H82 pattern (as it does in many other areas), with #170 with five Easter verses and #169 with six Doubting Thomas verses.

Since Covid, I've been monitoring the online bulletins for six Episcopal and ACNA parishes. Three sang the translated Tisserand text today: two H82 parishes sang #206, and one H40 parish sang #99, as we did at our Continuing parish.

Sadly, the Savannah, Georgia ACNA parish that is the home of Sing Unto the Lord did read John 20:19-31, but did not schedule hymn #169 from its hymnal. Instead, it had two regular Easter hymns (part of the overflow from Easter Sunday that often happens throughout early Eastertide).

Still, I think the message is clear: for those who focus on the Doubting Thomas story for low Sunday, there is one clear choice of a hymn — Neale’s opening verse, his five verses about John 20:19-31, plus (in some cases) three other verses from Neale’s longer original hymn — all set to the earliest known (if not only) tune used for this text.

Caravaggio, Incredulità di San Tommaso

The most famous C&E oratorio

Virtually all Anglicans know Handel’s most famous sacred work — which is probably the most famous long-form sacred work ever written in English. Most would know the three parts — first with OT prophesy of a Messiah and his birth in 1st century Judea, the second with Christ’s atoning sacrifice, and the third focusing on the second coming.

In a Friday op-ed in the Wall Street Journal — in the weekly “Houses of Worship” feature — assistant WSJ editorial page writer (and Hillsdale alumna) Nicole Ault laments the scarcity of Eastertide performances of what instead has become a staple of the Christmas season. The work was originally performed April 13, 1742 during Eastertide, and its librettist thought it ideally suited for Holy Week.

She spotlights the enduring power of the text by English librettist Charles Jennens:

A devout Anglican, Jennens wrote “Messiah” in part to battle the deists of his age, who posited a distant God but not a Savior. As rationalists, they put no stock in things of faith like resurrection from the dead. “ ‘Messiah,’ with its insistence on God’s free . . . gift of his Son, on the historical fact of the Incarnation and the supernatural fact of Redemption, was an assertion of everything that the Deists sought to deny,” writes Richard Luckett in his 1992 book, Handel’s Messiah: A Celebration.

Ault closes her column with a tribute to the witness the final part that this libretto offers to the promise of the Resurrection:

But besides testifying to facts that require faith, “Messiah” also bears witness to a hope that results from that faith. The feeling is personal: “I know that my Redeemer liveth,” sings the soprano in one of the work’s sweetest solos, “yet in my flesh shall I see God.”

It is also unassailable. Easter seals the promise of eternal life, revealed at Christmas but unfulfilled except through death and resurrection. Thus, quoting the apostle Paul, “Messiah” can say what is ours to proclaim as well: “O death, where is thy sting? Oh grave, where is thy victory?”